


Memory and Thorn

by Moontyger



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:19:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moontyger/pseuds/Moontyger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The past was a country the dead couldn't escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory and Thorn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackOfNone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/gifts).



Time was different for death knights: a strange, slippery thing, easy to lose track of if you weren't paying attention.

It had been worse when their minds and wills were overshadowed; under the Lich King's rule, time was rendered meaningless, just one more thing left behind in the world of the living. There was time for training and time limits for missions, but how that related to anything else was irrelevant.

It was only after he'd been freed that Thassarian had truly noticed how completely he'd been severed from its flow. While he'd been a puppet, the world had moved on, leaving him behind. Not entirely, of course: Leryssa had grown and changed, but she'd refused to abandon her brother. But every time he saw her, he noticed the little things: the start of fine lines around her eyes, hands that were more weathered than he remembered – tiny changes, as of yet, but he knew they'd only grow. And he? Like a statue, he was unchanged, unmarked by the time that changed all else.

But changes such as those were perhaps more noticeable for the shorter-lived races. He'd never asked any of the elves or draenei about it, but it seemed likely. In time, they would see changes as well, but that time was not yet. Still, even they had to notice the lack of the natural rhythms of life. He could no longer time practice blows with his heartbeat; he had no breath to hold to increase focus. Such small things they had seemed when he was alive, scarcely worthy of notice, but their absence felt far larger when they were gone.

Thassarian sighed and raised a hand to massage his forehead, a gesture that was more habit than anything else. He would have had a headache when he was alive and he felt the echo of that pain now, dimmed by time and likely entirely illusory, and yet real enough to bother him.

He wasn't usually so introspective. But who wouldn't be, confronted with the harshest reminder of the passage of time yet: the ruins of Andorhal. Andorhal, once a thriving city in a powerful kingdom, a kingdom that was likewise ruined, its name slowly being lost to history with each year that passed. Now this land was known as the Plaguelands, a name unlikely to encourage living settlers. Not that its older name would be much better. After what had happened here, who would choose to live in Lordaeron? 

He shook his head, hair that once would have been too soaked with sweat to move in heat like this instead flying free, and snorted. Lordaeron. A kingdom he'd once called home, once believed in. A kingdom whose prince had betrayed him. And now, it was just a memory – a memory and a few decaying remains, just like him and all the other death knights. 

Memory. That was the answer to everything, wasn't it? Memory was a trap; he knew that. He couldn't help but know it. And yet it was the one trap he couldn't escape. How, after all, could he deny his nature? If he ever did, if these memories ever faded enough to set him free, he'd lay down and die once more, nothing left of the man he'd once been.

Memories were the reason he kept going, the reason he was here, leading a fight to recover the town that had been lost. And memories were the reason he was walking away, leaving both a fight lost and old loyalties behind.

He adjusted the blades on his back, frowning to himself as he walked, legs moving automatically as his lungs no longer did. Thassarian walked, but more than that, he _remembered_ : dead white eyes glittering with hate, promising revenge even as the elf he'd just raised struggled to sit up, to make dead muscles work once more. Even as he saw the Lich King take control, the hate fading as that indomitable will took over, he'd thought that he'd better watch his back. Hate like that wouldn't just go away; neither Arthas nor the cold of the grave could erase it entirely.

He didn't know how much later it had been when he first felt the bite of a blade in his back, but he'd known even as he gasped in pain whose blade it must be. It wasn't that there was no one else who might want him out of the way; hate and betrayal came as easily to death knights as breathing once had. But no one else had such a good reason.

Wincing, he removed the dagger. He no longer bled like a living man: in the absence of a beating heart, his blood flowed cold and sluggishly, but he bled just the same as he turned to face his attacker. “A blade in the dark, Koltira? I did you more honor than that.”

“Honor?” Koltira's voice was a harsh rasp and Thassarian wondered how long it had been since he'd used it. “Honor would have been to leave me where I fell.”

Thassarian shrugged, but didn't deny it. It was true, yet Koltira knew why he hadn't been able to do it, why he wouldn't be able to do it any number of times in future. That honor was not one the Scourge could give.

He could have drawn his runeblades then and there, faced Koltira once more in battle. Now, he didn't remember why he didn't. Instead, he'd tossed the dagger aside, heard the clang as it hit the cold steel wall of Acherus. That done, Thassarian had turned his back once more and limped away.

He should have had the wound repaired, but he hadn't done that either. Instead, he'd left it, despite the pain it caused, pain that had never gone away, but that he'd gradually ceased to notice except for those rare occasions when it flared up, sharp as the day it had been made. After all, he deserved it. But even then, he'd wondered why Koltira had chosen not to use his runeblade. The larger weapon was harder to maneuver swiftly, of course, but the damage it caused would have been more severe. Thassarian had taken Koltira's life; didn't he want to return the favor?

* * *

That wasn't the end of it, of course. Koltira had called him a fool more than once since that day, but Thassarian had never been so foolish as that.

The next attempt was less subtle, but perhaps more effective for that. They'd been on a mission together: standard Scourge “recruitment”, nothing special, and not alone. But they'd been fighting side-by-side when suddenly, Koltira's blade veered away from the humans they were fighting and cut at Thassarian instead.

He managed to dodge just enough to keep the wound from being fatal, but it was a close thing. And this time, with his weapons already drawn and battle hunger upon him, Thassarian fought back. The mission and its targets were forgotten, no longer worthy of his attention as he fought for what remained of his life.

He didn't know how long they battled that day, nor who might have won in the end. Before they got that far, they were separated – not by the other death knights with them, but by the Lich King, who had noticed what they were doing and decided to stop them. Not because he cared if they killed each other, of course. Their sin was _disobedience_ : disregarding his mission and goals for their own personal vendettas. His will slammed down like a hammer blow and they both froze, muscles locking in instinctive surrender.

At the time, he'd been resentful – no, that wasn't true. Right then, he'd felt nothing at all, his own emotions crushed beneath the weight of his master's. The resentment had come later, after he'd been freed: present feelings projected onto his past self. But Thassarian also felt oddly grateful. Had it not been for Arthas' interference, perhaps he'd have killed Koltira a second time that day. Or maybe he'd have been the one to die; either way, it's an outcome he was glad to have avoided.

They'd both had to see a necrosurgeon after that, of course; they'd done too much damage to each other to avoid it. And then they'd been punished, and not just in the way of the living army Thassarian had enlisted in, though Falric didn't pass up the opportunity to yell at them. The real punishment came from their King. They had incurred his displeasure, which meant they had attracted his attention – attention that remained for quite some time.

* * *

After that, however, things had changed between them. They weren't friends, but Koltira no longer glared at Thassarian whenever they encountered one another. They nodded to each other in passing – polite but distant co-workers, who recognized each other in hallways but never spoke.

They could have gone on like that forever and, if it had been solely up to Thassarian, they probably would have. He didn't expect the elf he'd murdered to want to befriend him; he was content merely to know that he wasn't just waiting for his chance to kill him in return.

It wasn't their next battle, nor the one after that. At the time, Thassarian hadn't been counting, neither the battles nor the passage of time. But he remembered this fight – the one that had changed everything.

It was one of their earlier skirmishes against the Scarlet Crusade: earlier and deadlier for both sides. Thassarian found himself trapped, separated from the other death knights - pinned down and too weakened by the Holy magic of one of their priests to stop the paladin's sword. He'd fallen to his knees, burning inside and out, and was certain he was looking at his second death.

He knew it; had even accepted it, and then had that knowledge proved false. It was Koltira who led the charge that rescued him; Koltira who carried him back to Acherus. Thassarian still wasn't sure why he'd done it. He could have asked, but the time never seemed right. Even if he had, he wasn't sure Koltira would have had an answer.

This time, while his wounds were repaired, Koltira waited nearby. He heard when Thassarian insisted that one wound remain and he saw which one it was, though he didn't ask him about it until they were alone.

“You've left it all this time?” he asked, his voice thoughtful rather than horrified or angry.

“Yes.” Thassarian offered no explanation; he didn't blame it on the guilt he still felt, nor did he mention the secret, sharp pleasure it sometimes gave him, a pleasure he didn't even try to justify or understand. He didn't think about such things when he was merely a soldier of the Scourge and later, there seemed little point.

Perhaps Koltira had felt that guilty pleasure, too, because he merely nodded and didn't press him further. And one night not too much later, he greeted Thassarian with another knife from the shadows.

This one wasn't intended to kill; it was aimed nowhere near the heart. It was a cut meant to wound, to cause pain and blood loss and nothing more. As Thassarian stared at it, black blood oozing around the decorative elven hilt, he knew that Koltira had understood the explanation he hadn't offered.

Three nights later, he returned the knife, embedding it carefully in the meat of Koltira's thigh.

From then on, they continued in this fashion: slowly cutting each other to pieces, though always careful not to do too much damage. Nothing that might cause another death or attract too much attention; that had no part in this. The weapons they used and the wounds they caused varied, but the sweetness of the pain was always the same.

To the rest of the Scourge, they had become brothers-in-arms, bound tighter through the blood Thassarian had shed than the mere shared blood of living siblings. It wasn't so unusual; among death knights, murder was a bond none could break. Thassarian and Koltira both knew that brother wasn't quite the word for what they were to each other, but there seemed no others that fit. Lover didn't seem right, not when the blades they sheathed in each other's flesh were entirely literal. But it wasn't far off either; certainly Thassarian's feeling went beyond the brotherly.

Once, shortly after they'd been freed, while they were still with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, they tried to be lovers in the human way. They were capable; their bodies hadn't quite forgotten the way of it and could fake it well enough. But Koltira's mouth tasted of rot and his body was cold, the skin almost waxy beneath Thassarian's hands. They went through the motions, but the truth was, Thassarian felt nothing until Koltira bit him savagely – bit, then turned his head sharply, ripping out a chunk of his shoulder. He responded with bites of his own and, biting and clawing, they reached their own sort of climax: a sensation more remembered than felt, that left the sheets covered in bits of flesh and dried blood.

They never tried it again. Once was enough to make it clear that sex, at least in that way, was for the living. For them, there could be no tenderness, no caresses, not without feeling like a mockery. Pain was the closest they could get and so carefully, lovingly, they gave each other pain.

* * *

Thassarian shifted uncomfortably under the weight of the runeblades on his back and tugged a hood farther down over his face. The pain of that old wound was sharper today than it had been in many years: a reminder of his reasons for being here with every step he took.

The border between the Plaguelands and Tirisfal Glades wasn't as heavily patrolled as it had been and he'd made it inside easily enough, but from here, things would only get harder. Dead flesh crawled as he felt eyes upon him, though if they recognized him as an interloper, they gave no sign of it.

The time for memory was past, but as he prepared to enter the Undercity, he wondered what he would find within. _Did Sylvanas give you pain, too, Koltira? If she did, did you enjoy it? Did you wish it were me?_

He didn't have a real plan, though he knew he should. He didn't have enough information for a plan. He knew Koltira was here, somewhere in the ruins beneath this city where it all began, and that was the extent of his knowledge. Thassarian didn't know where or what condition he'd find him in, but he began his descent with a sense of anticipation.

He'd find Koltira and somehow they'd escape. Where they'd go after that, when they were hunted by both sides, he didn't know. But somewhere down here as well was Byfrost, a runeblade that had tasted his blood not once, but many times, and hungered for it still. And one day, in that vague future Thassarian couldn't quite imagine, it would taste it again, wielded by the only master it would ever know. He had no gift for prophecy and yet he was certain of it. 

The past was a country the dead couldn't escape, and that included the dead who still walked, still felt and needed and hungered. Who still bled and who were still far too capable of fear. But at the moment, Thassarian felt none. As he took the first steps into the grim of the Undercity, the saying felt like a promise, not the morbid inevitability it had once seemed. One day, he and Koltira would be trading cuts from the shadows once more. 

He could hardly wait.


End file.
